5.1 Configuration requirements

The one real requirement of Automake is that your configure.ac call AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE. This macro does several things that are required for proper Automake operation (see Macros).

Here are the other macros that Automake requires but which are not run by AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE:

AC_CONFIG_FILES

AC_OUTPUT

Automake uses these to determine which files to create (see Creating Output Files (The Autoconf Manual)). A listed file is considered to be an Automake generated Makefile if there exists a file with the same name and the .am extension appended. Typically, AC_CONFIG_FILES([foo/Makefile]) will cause Automake to generate foo/Makefile.in if foo/Makefile.am exists.

When using AC_CONFIG_FILES with multiple input files, as in

          AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile:top.in:Makefile.in:bot.in])
     

automake will generate the first .in input file for which a .am file exists. If no such file exists the output file is not considered to be Automake generated.

Files created by AC_CONFIG_FILES are removed by make distclean.